BroadVision Marketing Blog

Where did you say that visitor came from again? There are two sets of visitors—organic searchers and paid visitors. A paid visitor is one who responds to one of your ads, on Google, Facebook or otherwise. Are you aware that the Federal Trade Commission has just released new guidelines for Online and Mobile Advertisers? This information came out March 12, 2013 and is known as "Dot Com Disclosures" How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising. The rules are intended to protect consumers from fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices. If you are a blogger who sells items, you need to read this. If you are an affiliate marketer, you need to read this. If you put ads anywhere online, you need to read this.

Where did that prospect go? He showed some interest in something connected with your service or product, but then he drifted away. The truth is that with so many marketing tools available, your leads are showing up much earlier in the buying cycle than ever before. You might see some activity on your blog, social media or from a web search; but this might just be a case of information-gathering on the part of the prospect. Could you use some internet marketing tips on using lead intelligence so you don’t lose that lead?

By doing a little mining of the lead intelligence information you get when someone drops in, you can develop a super sales advantage. Lead intelligence is all about learning vital information about your prospect to help you close the sale. It enables you to create personalized, targeted lead nurturing campaigns geared to the needs of the prospect. Using lead intelligence you can create personalized, lead nurturing suiting your prospect’s needs.

Here are 7 internet marketing tips that will help you collect information on your quest for lead intelligence.

1. What’s in a name? A lead’s name is one of the easiest pieces of intelligence you are able to mine. After you have her name, you can address her by name when you send out an email. You have just created a more personalized experience for your prospect. This is one of the super internet marketing tips to add to your lead nurturing campaign.
2. Demographic lead intelligence is a must. We can’t stress demographics enough as one of the must-have internet marketing tips. You want to know your prospect’s age, gender and location. With these bits of intelligence you can get information about your prospect’s wants and needs, and how you can qualify this person up front.
3. Is your persona on stage? Another of our internet marketing tips on lead intelligence concerns well-defined marketing personas. You need to know where your actual lead might best look for information. One persona will be looking to your website for information on your business while another has a particular question that he wants answered. You want to be sure that each different kind of lead can find you though the noise of all the other sales businesses on the internet hawking something similar to yours.
4. What pages has your prospect viewed? By getting this piece of internet marketing lead information you can tell what stage of the sales cycle your lead is in. If your lead visits your product pages, this could mean the prospect is close to a sale and is ready for nurturing with information and content focused for that product.
5. Let’s get sociable. What if your lead comes to one of your social media platforms? Of all our internet marketing tips, this is one not everyone takes adequate advantage of. Does your prospect get sociable or just lurk? If he leaves remarks, you can get an idea of what his problems and pain points are. You have a great chance at this point to answer back as soon as you can to nurture this prospect with content on your website that addresses his pain points.
6. It’s free (well, almost). Has your prospect already gotten some of your free whitepapers and reports?  While he thinks they are free, he does “pay” by giving you his information. How many times has he done so? Do you know how many forms the prospect has completed and what type of business lead generation material the lead has looked at? How long has this prospect been on your site? If you can, offer a discount or coupon to those who have come to your site often. If it works for Starbucks, it can work for you.
7. Email in good measure. Email is another of the great internet marketing tips. How much have you emailed this prospect? Is your lead a part of an email list or lead nurturing campaign? Has she clicked on any links (you should have at least 3 places per email to encourage her to do that)? Which links did your prospect click on? Be careful. This piece of lead intelligence is not an opportunity to bombard her with all kinds of campaigns and multiple email posts a day. Remember we want to nurture our prospects, not have them unsubscribe from our email.

How are you doing with your New Year’s Resolutions? I see you looking down at the floor. I guess you have already broken those things. What about those of you who intended to work up SMART goals? You haven’t started them yet, have you? Now that we know where we stand, let’s look at goals in another smart fashion.

Newsjacking—love it, hate it, never heard of it? How can an internet marketing tip that has been around since 2011 when David Meeman Scott wrote Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage not be a part of common marketing terminology? You need all the internet marketing tips you can get to help you publish interesting blogs. So what is newsjacking? Scott, describes it as “the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.”

Have you counted the number of social media networks you are on? How many computers, tablets, netbooks, laptops, smartphones, etc., do you use to connect to these social media networks? How many times have you given “permission” to access your data to those networks? Do you know how many friends, not-so-close friends and work friends you have circled, grouped and filtered?

With Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, FourSquare, SlideShare and new social media growing and changing—do you ever wonder how anyone gets anything done all day? It eats into everyone’s day in a frantic, addictive time press.  What are we doing with our time?

Cui Bono

What blasphemy is this, you ask. After all, everyone knows that internet marketing site visitors are people who are seeking information, shopping and coming back to your site for more. Right? Well, in actuality that is not right at all because you are not thinking about what is really going on technologically. SEO Logic in their blog post Web Traffic 101 says:

In a sense, there is no such thing as a site visitor. Instead of saying a person visits a site, it is correct to say that a person's user agent requests files which are retrieved from a website and rendered at the person's personal computer, thus creating the website traffic. The traffic is your site being sent to the person's computer after being invited by a user agent.

Guest Blogger: Ann Mullen

You have a product you want to sell. Putting it out on the street is not going to get it sold unless you are an ice cream man in the middle of July. Creating a website and writing blogs and more blogs about it aren’t going to get it sold either.

So if you have tried these methods without success or if you want to start selling your product, buckle up for a ride to your Target Market (no, not that Target).

Target market? What's that?

Your target market is the specific group of consumers that you want to aim your product or service towards. Don’t mind the preposition at the end of that sentence or the man behind the curtain.

Speaking of curtains, let’s say you want to sell curtains and draperies for fancy high-end living rooms. If you take your products to a gun store where people named Bubba and Billy Bob hang out, you have gone to the wrong target market. If you put your blog in this niche, you probably won’t get any bites either. You have to decide who you want to sell to.

Today's marketing news comes from three completely different sources, but each has a good suggestion. Harvard Business review asks companies to decide what the point of their company is. After all, how can you brand and market a company without this information.

Manta, whose mini-articles are emailed to me daily suggested you check out Brandify.com to see how to use your branding, after you have a clue about the point of your company.

Here is an example of the media marketing strategy that not only breaks every rule, it runs over them as well, twice. This cute cartoon was made in Great Britain.

by Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing and Robert Middleton, owner of Action Plan Marketing

Once you are armed with the previously blogged marketing principles, you are ready to choose marketing strategies or activities that get your message out into the world and in front of prospective clients.

Let's revisit Marketing Ball. The marketing strategies you employ depend on where your prospects are located on the Marketing Ball model. Remember that the purpose is to move them around the bases. First are marketing activities to get prospects onto first base.

From stranger to affiliation to attention

Your first step in moving from home base to first is developing affiliations with those who could be possible clients. An affiliation is a connection between people. If you belong to an association or organization, you have an affiliation. If you went to the same college, you have an affiliation. If you belong to a church, you have an affiliation with all the other members.